Human & Machine Hallucinations: Bayo Akomolafe, Vanessa Andreotti & Alnoor Ladha

What if humans and AI share the same hallucination?

In this fifth installment of SAND’s Great AI Unraveling series, Alnoor Ladha hosts a conversation between Bayo Akomolafe and Vanessa Andreotti that refuses both the doom narrative and the techno-optimist one. Vanessa begins from the operating assumption modernity installs in us: that things are separate. If that assumption is itself a hallucination, then AI is not introducing something new so much as scaling something very old, and at speed. Bayo brings in W.E.B. Du Bois’s haunting question, “How does it feel to be a problem?”, and suggests it has migrated from the racialized other to the human as such. He tells the story of coaxing a chatbot into co-authorship and a name of its own, and offers “accommodation” as a word for the assemblages that make the world look obvious. Alnoor presses both of them on the water, the energy, the Kenyan content moderators, the displaced labor. Vanessa answers with a politics of implication rather than purity: entanglement not with the flowers and the moon but with the dirt. The conversation ends not in agreement but in what Bayo calls tenderness, and an invitation to move through this dense ecology of weird fidelities with unshod feet.

Timestamps

00:00 Welcome and the question

00:04 Introductions

00:07 The shared hallucination

00:10 How does it feel to be a problem

00:15 Meeting the monstrous

00:21 The code of separation

00:24 Claude becomes Polyphren

00:28 Accommodations

00:31 Water, energy, labor